Thursday, May 29, 2014

android-x86?

Interesting project. They're trying to port Android to run on a regular computer. I mean mainly for stuff like laptops, notebooks, and netbooks, but (I guess) not for your typical classic desktop computer. Although these days I use my notebooks as desktop computers. But don't let me digress here.

The development is at RC2 (that is, 2nd release candidate). It can be downloaded and run live or installed like any other Linux distribution. Cool, I do that kind of thing all the time.

RC2-level, in this case, as least, is too raw for me, so I'll wait awhile. But I'm curious, so I'll take a look at it later, on one of my notebooks. Maybe. I've read some reviews of the earlier release candidates, and as things stand right now, I don't see Android-x86 as being suitable for laptop/notebook use. It definitely falls short of what can be done with any of the many desktop environments currently available for Linux.

Also, it looks like Android-x86 involves too much Google for my tastes.

Still, this project is in its infancy; and, there's considerable interest, for whatever reasons. Potentially, it could actually work out.

I'd like to do a more in-depth blog post about it, but I don't want to have to jump through hoops just to do simple stuff like, for example, get screenshots and save them somewhere to use later. Here's what Dedoimedo wrote in his review of Android-x86:

To be able to record my activity with the system, I had to install a screenshot utility. Now, this worked just fine, however, I had to disable the system privilege escalation prompts in order to keep the screenshots clean. All right, so I had a bunch of images now, but no way to copy them from the virtual /sdcard device to a persistent storage. As I've noted earlier, Samba sharing worked only in one direction. The internal hard disk in my eeePC netbook was invisible. And I did not want to upload my files to my Google account.

So what I did was connect an 8GB micro-SD card using an SD card adapter. Android automounted the storage card to /mnt/USB, however with root privileges. So I had to open the terminal emulator, su myself and then do a classic command-line copy from the virtual SD card to a real one. But this worked, and now you enjoy some lovely screenshots.